Smartphone maker Huawei appears to be getting all enthusiastic about the Cloud market.

Huawei revealed its latest enterprise service cunning plan designed to support companies undergoing cloud transformation.

Huawei wants to be an industry cloud enabler and a strategic partner to customers across diverse industries by investing USD 500 million in the development of cloud-based professional services, a cloud platform and cloud ecosystem.

This will provide customers with end-to-end cloud transformation service solutions enabling them to build, use, and manage their cloud platforms effectively.

President of Technical Service Department for Huawei Enterprise Business Group, Sun Maolu said: "With the emergence of a 'Cloud Only' era, Huawei is adopting a long term cloud transformation service strategy to support our enterprise customers in their journey to the cloud. Our services strategy centers on the concept of 'Grow with the Cloud' and becoming an industry cloud enabler.

"Huawei's enterprise services will focus on four key areas including cloud innovation, creating a digital platform, supporting smart operations and enabling businesses. To drive this strategy forward, Huawei will continue to increase its investment in the development of service solutions and Global Service Centres, and tools, platforms and verification labs for professional services. In the next five years, we will also focus on research and development of industry clouds, increasing our annual investment by more than 50 per cent," he said.

According to Xu Jingbin, Director of IT Technical Service Department for Huawei Enterprise Business Group: "With a track record of industry cloud solution delivery, Huawei works closely with our partners to develop end-to-end industry cloud transformation services that cover consulting, assessment, planning and design, migration, disaster recovery (DR), security, and O&M. As business continuity is critical during complex cloud migration, Huawei provides a sophisticated migration process with 4 stages and 17 steps, and professional migration tools developed in-house, which have helped more than 1,000 customers migrate their businesses to the cloud smoothly and efficiently."

Huawei will invest more than USD 500 million in the next five years to develop all-scenario services and integrated verification capabilities for its enterprise services. In China, Huawei has already established an industry planning and design verification lab, a disaster recovery and migration lab, a safe city verification centre, and financial services verification centers.

Leslie Rosenberg, IDC Research Director, said: "Huawei invests heavily in the development of Intellectual Property through the establishment of R&D centers to accelerate innovation, differentiation and delivery of its services.”

Google is cutting the price for high speed storage attached to its cloud virtual machines.

Punters will pay up to 63 percent less for Local SSD storage that’s attached to the virtual machines they use in Google Cloud Platform.

Local SSD storage is designed to offer companies high-speed data access for cloud applications that require it for high performance like data analysis and other tasks. Google’s storage will last for as long as the underlying instance keeps running in the company’s cloud.

Google offers the ability to store arbitrary amounts of data in a Local SSD blob, rather than lock certain instance types to certain amounts of storage. Customers are charged for how much data they store each month. In the US. customers, Google will charge eight cents per GB stored per month under the new pricing scheme. We have not heard what the Euro price will be yet.

These price cuts also benefit users of GCP’s Preemptible virtual machines that can run for a maximum of 24 hours and can be shut down by the tech giant at any time if it needs the compute capacity for other workloads. In exchange for those drawbacks, customers using Preemptible VMs will be able to get the same compute power for a lower price.

All this shows how cut throat cloudy competition is getting with Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure all slashing their prices to stay ahead.

Intel reported profits nine per cent higher than last year, but most of its money came from a rush on its products ear marked for the datacentre rather than its PC bread and butter.

CEO Brian Krzanich told investors on the company's second quarter earnings that Intel's booming data center business has catapulted Intel as "the rising force of the data revolution across different industries".

"We're seeing that the data center continues to be a great growth engine for the company," Krzanich said. "I'm very pleased with our product and I'm more confident than ever in Intel's growth. In Q2, we extended our leadership with new breakthrough products in client computing, data center and memory... that reset the bar for performance leadership, and we’re gaining customer momentum in areas like AI [artificial intelligence] and autonomous driving."

Overall, the chip giant posted earnings of $2.81 billion for the second quarter ended July 1 on overall sales of $14.8 billion, about nine percent higher than the $13.4 billion reported in the same quarter a year ago.

That was a bit better than the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had been predicting. Most of them thought Intel would make about $14.41 billion.

But all this is on the back of Intel's new Xeon scalable server processor platform, which is aimed specifically at datacentre applications with the new mesh-based Purley architecture to reduce latency at high core counts.

"The initial reaction to Xeon scalable has been extremely positive... it's the largest performance improvement in a decade gen-to-gen, so we're seeing a very large ramp in the second half as we move forward with this product," said Krzanich.

Intel's Data Center Group, which the company said now accounts for more than 40 percent of its total revenue, grew nine percent in the second quarter of 2017 to $4.4 billion. Looking ahead, Krzanich said the company's datacentre business remains on track to reach "high-single-digit" growth for the year.

Intel's Client Computing Group sales also grew in the second quarter, increasing 12 percent to $8.2 billion. Intel has also been focusing on budding opportunities in the enthusiast market segment as part of its overall PC strategy – in the spring, the chip giant launched its Core X platform to equip gamers in the enthusiast segments with extreme performance and mega-tasking capacities.

Meanwhile, revenue from Intel's Internet of Things Group shot up 26 percent to $720 million in the second quarter, while its Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group sales grew 58 percent to $874 million.

The US government has become so arrogant that it thinks it can order other countries to hand over data to its spooks and has asked the highest court in the land to back it.

In a move which will give the US cloud suppliers apoplexy, the Justice Department has petitioned the US Supreme Court to allow US search warrants to extend to data stored on foreign servers.

The US government says it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.

The request for Supreme Court intervention concerns a four year old legal battle between Microsoft and the US government over data stored on Dublin, Ireland servers. The US government has a valid warrant for the e-mail as part of a drug investigation. Microsoft told it to go forth and multiply. It convinced a federal appeals court that US law does not apply to foreign data.

The government told the justices that US law allows it to get overseas data, and national security was at risk.

"This Court should grant review to restore the government’s ability to require providers to disclose electronic communications—which are, in this day and age, often the only or the most critical evidence of terrorism and crime," the government wrote.

If the Supremes agree then the EU will almost certainly respond by banning all US technology companies from operating in the bloc. The issue is that if US technology companies have to hand over data to US spooks then effectively no European data is safe.

Congress is trying to hash out legislation that would allow the US government to enter into reciprocity agreements with other countries so that each side has the right to access data on foreign servers—with a valid warrant.

But it is unlikely to go down well with any European country other than the UK which is desperate for friends. In fact Teresa May would sell the Americans Scotland if she thought it would get a decent trade deal.

Boffins from Microsoft and the University of Washington are planning to encode cloud data onto synthetic DNA molecules.

The team successfully encoded about 200 megabytes of data onto synthetic DNA molecules and Vole now thinks the tech is ready for commercial use.

Computer architects at Microsoft Research say the company has formalised a goal of having an operational storage system based on DNA working inside a data center toward the end of this decade.

Doug Carmean, a partner architect at Microsoft Research, said that the aim is to build a proto-commercial system in three years storing some amount of data on DNA in one of our four centers for at least a boutique application. Vole wants to replace tape drives, a common format used for archiving information.

DNA storage has a few hurdles to overcome. Converting digital bits into DNA code - made up of chains of nucleotides labeled A, G, C, and T - is tricky and expensive because of the chemical process used to manufacture DNA strands.

In its demo, Vole used 13,448,372 unique pieces of DNA. Experts say buying that much material on the open market would cost $800,000.

According to Microsoft, the cost of DNA storage needs to fall by a factor of 10,000 before it becomes widely adopted. While many experts say that's unlikely, Microsoft believes such advances could occur if the computer industry demands them.

The expensive esoteric software outfit which makes management software which no one is really sure quite what it does, but the CEO thinks they need it, reported slightly lower-than-expected first-quarter core profit.

SAP sold more of its cloud products, which are less profitable than the full fat version which does.... er something else.

First-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, for the German software maker rose eight percent to 1.198 billion euro the company said.

That was slightly below the average of 1.229 billion euro which Wall Street analysts expected..

Revenues rose 12 percent to 5.285 billion euros, which was above average expectations of 5.179 billion.

SAP's customer base moved further to newer cloud-based and less profitable internet platforms from classic high-margin packaged software products it has sold for decades.

New cloud bookings jumped 49 percent to 215 million euro during the first quarter.

SAP's finance chief Luka Mucic said in a statement that his firm continued its rapid expansion in cloud.

"We're off to a good start to reach our full-year targets and we are confident that we will grow our profitability in 2018 and beyond."

SAP said it still expects revenue for 2017 of 23.2 to 23.6 billion euro, while operating profit is seen at 6.8-7.0 billion euro, both at constant currencies.

Microsoft has written a cheque to buy Deis, an open source container orchestration company which allows for the creation and management of apps on top of Kubernetes.

Microsoft bought Deis from platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Engine Yard, which bought OpDemand in 2015 – the original creator of Deis. Terms of the new deal are yet to be confirmed.

According to Vole, there are shedloads of customers looking to build and deploy containerised workloads on the Azure cloud, and the new acquisition will support them in achieving this.

Writing in his bog, Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, said that the Deis team were strong supporters of the open source community – developing tools, contributing code and organising developer meetups.

"We expect Deis’ technology to make it even easier for customers to work with our existing container portfolio including Linux and Windows Server Containers, Hyper-V Containers and Azure Container Service, no matter what tools they choose to use", he added.

Microsoft announced last year that it would be adding the commercial version of the Docker Engine into Windows Server 2016. The tech giant has also released a recent blog with Docker which discusses opportunities for their technologies to jointly support enterprise workloads.

Deis has led many open source projects, including Helm, Workflow and Steward, offering solutions for developers building, deploying, managing and scaling applications on Kubernetes. The projects incorporate container technologies into application platforms combining technologies from Google, Docker and CoreOS. The outfit said it would continue to operate these existing projects from within Microsoft.

In a Deis press release, CTO Gabriel Monroy noted that his company was impressed with Microsoft’s cloud leadership and support for the open source community. He wrote that the move would help to "define, shape and build new cloud-native applications".

The real brains behind Apple, Steve Wozniak, has written a cheque for a huge chunk of the automated paper-digitization company named Ripcord.

Ripcord has built machines that can scan, index, and categorise paper records to make them searchable through companies' existing systems, via the cloud.

Basically Ripcord unboxes the files and passes them to its machines, which scan, upload, and convert the content into searchable PDFs. Ripcord says that the conversion and classification process is around 80 percent automated and covers handling, the removal of staples, and scanning.

It all makes sense as a business and it is surprising that no one has really tried it before. After all, there are rather a lot of companies which have huge paper stores which could be valuable if they were able to be easily searched.

But what has stopped it happening is that most of the files have staples, paperclips or are shoved in binders.

Ripcord uses robots to do it at a cost of .004 cents per page -- for every month that it's stored in the cloud.

Woz isn’t known for making a lot of investments, so the participation of the Apple founder is a nice addition.

Ripcord was cofounded by Alex Fielding, who was an engineer at Apple in the 1990s.

Fruity tax-dodging cargo-cult Apple has reassured its legions of fans in the media that there is no way that Turkish hackers can bring down its entire operation.

Yesterday we ran a yarn where a bunch of Turkish hackers were blackmailing Apple for a comparatively small sum by threatening to delete hundreds of millions of iCloud accounts.

Motherboard reported that a group calling itself the Turkish Crime Family was claiming to have stolen details for upwards of 300 million iCloud accounts in a bid to extort money from Apple. The group demanded $75,000 in either Bitcoin or fellow cryptocurrency Ethereum, or $100,000 of iTunes gift cards by April 7, or else it would reset iCloud accounts and remotely wipe Apple devices.

Apple has released an official statement saying that Apple has not been compromised and none of the company’s systems — including iCloud and Apple ID — had been breached, and that the alleged list of email addresses and passwords “appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services".

In other words, it is all someone else’s fault, only a small number of people have been affected, and none of them were Apple’s responsibility.

While we agree that it is incredibly unlikely to be a real hack and that the Turks are probably not going to switch Apple off, Apple uses this statement as a default when anything goes wrong.

One of the compromised third-party services Apple mentions in its statement is likely to be LinkedIn, with many of the addresses and passwords in the Turkish Crime Family’s list corresponding with ones stolen during a massive security breach of the business networking site in 2012.

Even if the information is new and legitimate, Apple says it’s watching iCloud closely, “actively monitoring to prevent unauthorised access to user accounts,” while also working with law enforcement to work out who was behind the threats.

“To protect against these type of attacks,” the company says, “we always recommend that users always use strong passwords, not use those same passwords across sites, and turn on two-factor authentication".

Nvidia and Microsoft unveiled blueprints for a new hyperscale GPU accelerator to drive AI cloud computing.

Providing hyperscale data centers with a fast, flexible path for AI, the new HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator is an open-source design released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus.

HGX-1 does for cloud-based AI workloads what ATX -- Advanced Technology eXtended -- did for PC motherboards when it was introduced more than two decades ago. The new architecture is designed to meet the demand for AI computing in the cloud -- in fields such as autonomous driving, personalised healthcare, superhuman voice recognition, data and video analytics, and molecular simulations.

Nvidia supreme dalek Jen-Hsun Huang said that AI is a new computing model that requires a new architecture and the HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator will do for AI cloud computing what the ATX standard did to make PCs pervasive today. It will enable cloud-service providers to easily adopt NVIDIA GPUs to meet surging demand for AI computing.

Writing in his bog, Vaid claimed that thousands of enterprises and startups worldwide that are investing in AI and adopting AI-based approaches and the HGX-1 architecture provides unprecedented configurability and performance in the cloud.

The system is based around eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs in a single chassis and features a new switching design based around Nvidia's NVLink and the PCIe standard. This allows a CPU to dynamically connect to any number of GPUs.

It allows cloud service providers that standardize on the HGX-1 infrastructure to offer customers a range of CPU and GPU machine instance configurations. The modular design of the HGX-1 allows for optimal performance no matter the workload. It provides up to 100x faster deep learning performance compared with legacy CPU-based servers, and is estimated at one-fifth the cost for conducting AI training and one-tenth the cost for AI inferencing.

The companies are sharing the design widely as part of Microsoft's Project Olympus contribution to the Open Compute Project, Sharing the reference design with the broader Open Compute Project community means that enterprises can easily purchase and deploy the same design in their own data centers.